In search of a saner Christmas

So we got back from our Thanksgiving holiday visit and got to hit the ground running. Christopher's 3rd grade holiday concert was scheduled for last night. That's right - the very day after Thanksgiving break. It took quite of bit of planning, scheduling, and goading children to get us all there in time. We made it, and it was good. But it got me thinking about the whole Christmas season in general.

I confess that the bigger and glitzier the commercial end of Christmas gets every year, the more I feel like crawling into a hole and hiding. I never understood those people who schedule a holiday cruise or trip to the tropics until recently. I loved the Christmas season as a child. All the decorating, baking, singing, gift buying, present wrapping, church pageants, Christmas music - the whole nine yards - loved every minute of it.

I do still love it - but it's different now that I'm in charge of it. My mom had just me, and by the time I was maybe 6 or 7 years old, I helped her. I've got 3 kids and a kitty. Even though my oldest 2 are technically old enough to help (and have, some) it's still quite the 3 ring circus trying to concentrate on Christmas preparations and keep the toddler and the kitty out of everything.

Even if I do get all the physical Christmas preparation done, I find that I've been missing the heart preparations. I have very little time to sit and drink in the significance of Christmas - the fact that God chose to come to Earth, to live among us as a man, to be born of a simple Jewish peasant girl and grow up in humble circumstances, to sacrifice His life for me on a rugged Roman cross, and to triumph over the powers of evil by rising from the dead. Emmanuel, God with us.

Then too there is the fact that Christ was not born on December 25th. Historians and theologians have placed the actual birth of Christ sometime around September (around the time of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles and the Day of Atonement.) Which, symbolically, would make sense. Since Jesus knew that He would become the fulfillment of the Passover lamb by being crucified during the Passover, it makes sense that He would be born during the time the Jews celebrated the time of God's tabernacling (residing with) mankind.

Even though I know that the celebration of Christ's birth was moved to December 25th to try to draw in the pagans (who celebrated the winter solstice and the feast of Saturnalia around that time) I like the idea of celebrating the return of the light (sunlight) and the Light. I think we need to celebrate both. I find it very satisfying and I know I wouldn't make such a herculean effort without the force of tradition behind it.

But this year I would like to look deeper inside myself, deeper into the word of God, to rediscover the Word of God, who was in the beginning - for Whom everything was made, and without Whom nothing that has been made would have been made.